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Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

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Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#131

Post by t-3 »

curioadu wrote: post #71
culi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean throughout the Americas you see really complex polycultural farming traditions including the famous chinampas. In Mesoamerica you also have the milpa cycle which is a system where you clear most herbs and lightly burn it to grow your crops in polycultures. After a few years, you grow more trees and these fields turn more into managed orchards that include both fruit trees and trees grown for lumbar. Eventually…

> throughout the Americas you see really complex polycultural farming traditions including the famous chinampas. Interesting. Do you know of anything somewhat similar for Africa, ignoring the lands of Egypt and the lands near the Mediterranean Sea?

If you hadn't excluded them, Morocco has a 2000 year old managed food forest.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#132

Post by tkel »

modo_mario wrote: post #123
tkel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lesson is more that indigenous people were (+ are) part of the ecology, not separate from it or above it. With cultural, social, technological, and spiritual practices that were formed dialectically and hyper-locally with the ecology, as a result of it, and as part of it. Often considered a keystone species in these ecologies.

Indigenous people in north america contributed to multiple extinctions. This is the noble savage trope you're putting on display

With regards to the Late Pleistocene extinction overkill hypothesis that you are referring to, your information is out of date, more recent evidence suggests that humans played only a minor or incidental role, with climate change (the end of an ice age), and habitat restructuring being the primary drivers.

I don't think you understand what the noble savage trope is. I'm commenting on the development of indigenous human societies in the Americas. The vast majority of them were ecologically compatible. This is not a commentary on the morality of individuals. To take the Mexica empire as an example, they were not a moral civilization by our standards (neither were the Spanish colonizers), and they had an over-reliance on corn and obsidian, but other than that they survived in a way that did not stress or extinguish or destabilize the surrounding ecology.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#133

Post by rishav_sharan »

gaigalas wrote: post #38
_heimdall wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been confused by the idea that we know all civilisation that has happened on earth, human or otherwise. Written record doesn't go back very far at all, and even archeological evidence is lacking. Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization. We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evide…

Our earliest record is the Rigveda (a written down oral tradition, we don't know exactly how far back it goes). I suggest you try to read it at least once. It's almost incomprehensible.

No. And it's not even close.

Rigveda would be around 1500Bce. Even Sumerian cuneiform would be far older at 3000 bce. If you want oldest oral records, some Australian aboriginal stories would be the ones at 8000 bce

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#134

Post by rishav_sharan »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #133
gaigalas wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our earliest record is the Rigveda (a written down oral tradition, we don't know exactly how far back it goes). I suggest you try to read it at least once. It's almost incomprehensible.

No. And it's not even close. Rigveda would be around 1500Bce. Even Sumerian cuneiform would be far older at 3000 bce. If you want oldest oral records, some Australian aboriginal stories would be the ones at 8000 bce

Oh and some researchers are putting down the story of "seven sisters"/pleiades to around 100k years ago, back when the 7th star in the constellation was visible

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#135

Post by I-M-S »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #128
I-M-S wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Iroquois did not have slaves. You might be thinking of individuals that were sometimes taken as compensation for people killed in battle. However, these people were then fully assimilated into the society with all the rights and obligations of anyone in the clan (in most cases, they would even take the name of the deceased). To call these people "slaves" is much more revealing of the Western civilization than tha…

Did those people have the right to leave or do what they wanted? https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790?seq=1 Read this paper and the contemporary accounts and tell me that's not slavery. >To modern Westerners, the use of such a kinship metaphor suggests and is believed to reflect genuine nurturing and closeness; however, in Africa and elsewhere it conveys an entirely different meaning: authority and subordination. >Vil…

I put much more credence into lived experiences than into academic journals. There's plethora of examples in which children/teens of the settlers taken by First Nations would refuse to go back (especially females, which had little rights in the American society back then). Conversely, First Nations children/teens that were taken by the settlers would almost without exception risk life and limb to escape their newfound circumstances.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#136

Post by rbanffy »

culi wrote: post #58
pibaker wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of why Europeans think the americas were pristine and barely touched by human existence is because smallpox was ahead of European explorers and by the time Europeans set foot on many places on the continent, they saw ecosystems that had recovered from human intervention after the local population had collapsed.

I've heard that explanation as well. But I don't know if "recovered from human intervention" is a fair characterization since they couldn't have been more than a decade behind the smallpox/diseases. Estimates range from 5 to 10 million people in the Amazonian Basin by the time Colombus reached the Americas (though some go as high as 20 million). I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human interven…

> I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human intervention

The weather there is quite brutal. Roads need tons of maintenance to remain passable. This is one of the reasons rivers are such an important transportation network.

> Amazonian landscape management is so radically different from what Europeans know that they likely just didn't realize what was before their eyes

This is an interesting explanation. Also, refusing to document previous occupation is a convenient way to claim land rights.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#137

Post by rbanffy »

somenameforme wrote: post #85
culi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean throughout the Americas you see really complex polycultural farming traditions including the famous chinampas. In Mesoamerica you also have the milpa cycle which is a system where you clear most herbs and lightly burn it to grow your crops in polycultures. After a few years, you grow more trees and these fields turn more into managed orchards that include both fruit trees and trees grown for lumbar. Eventually…

With these things it's always an issue of scale. What people don't realize about e.g. homesteading is that it's actually really easy to be entirely self sufficient on very small plots of land. But the tricky thing in the past was transport - when you start shoving many thousands of people into very small areas, you need to start producing more and more food in (relatively) smaller and smaller areas. Modern times has…

> Now moving tons of cargo hundreds of miles, or even half way around the world, is trivial and relatively rapid, but in ancient times you're looking at moving small amounts of cargo extremely slowly

This is one of the reasons they flourished near river networks that provided easier transport as well as food. They also build canals, but I’m not sure they were for navigation as much as irrigation.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#138

Post by rbanffy »

smt88 wrote: post #47
khanhnguyen8386 wrote: post #39

The myth of the 'pristine, untouched Amazon' was always a European trope. Lidar is proving that ancient civilizations were sophisticated ecosystem engineers, shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it.

The headline literally says they lived in 3% of the forest area, which implies that the vast majority of the rest of the forest actually was untouched

Not really. It refers to a single civilisation. Other societies existed in the neighbouring space and time.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#139

Post by rbanffy »

_heimdall wrote: post #27
marojejian wrote: post #2

Originally heard about this via Nature podcast's interview with the researcher: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02367-x This is a continuation of many findings in this direction. It's wonderful to imagine the many societies humans have created, and sad that we'll be able to learn so little about them.

I've always been confused by the idea that we know all civilisation that has happened on earth, human or otherwise. Written record doesn't go back very far at all, and even archeological evidence is lacking. Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization. We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evide…

> human or otherwise

This is a fascinating idea.

> and even archeological evidence is lacking.

A couple million years and your surface will be forever lost under a subduction zone. There is little sign of a global civilisation predating humans, but there is plenty spacetime for smaller societies that would have completely disappeared without a trace.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#140

Post by curioadu »

graemep wrote: post #121
curioadu wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The destruction during the Spanish conquests of the Aztecs and others was terrible. It was also rather disorganized initially, especially due to the huge delays regarding communication between the Americas and Europe. In regards to paper, while the Aztecs had impressive achievements, especially considering the almost complete isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world (is there any civilization close to the…

> is there any civilization close to the achievements of the Aztecs and other Amerindians in Africa south of Egypt? Aksum for a start.

Aksum was more east of Egypt than south, right? And part of it lay in the Arabian Peninsula.
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